Sunday 30 January 2005 10.48 EST
First published on Sunday 30 January 2005 10.48 EST

The Triumph of Painting Saatchi Gallery, London SE1; until 5 June

'The Triumph of Painting' is the biggest double entendre of a title Charles Saatchi has ever unleashed. Those four words have quite different meanings. Emphasise the first noun and you have a sincere if solemn exaltation of painting, and of the contemporary paintings displayed here in particular. Emphasise the second and the tone turns aggressive - painting triumphs over those other genres Saatchi once collected but has recently rejected. And does anyone seriously think the show's title is innocent?

It is only 18 months since the Saatchi Gallery reopened in County Hall with all those works of BritArt now lost, sold or sidelined. They were the guaranteed box office. Yet Saatchi seems to be parting company with the very artists with whom he was most famously associated. He has sold Rachel Whiteread's monumental masterpiece, Ghost, along with other works. He has lost the Chapmans' Hell and Emin's tent to the Momart fire, to name only two.

He has sold Hirst back to Hirst, among other buyers, bidding farewell to two of his greatest possessions: Away From the Flock (the sheep) and The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, better known as the biggest fish of what was once called Young British Art.

To think of the shark gone makes me feel oddly uneasy. Lord knows, we British have had enough opportunities to see it, especially since it was the main attraction at County Hall until only a few moments ago. But it still seems a bathetic end for the old death threat, to be installed in Manhattan's Moma and inspected as an English eccentricity by the lizards of Fifth Avenue between a spot of brunch and some light shopping at Barney's.

What will it be without Saatchi and vice-versa, each without the other's forceful flamboyance? Some works of art are in all senses made for their owners. Still, art is money, in this case £7 million, and without the relentless exchange of goods for capital that is his diversion, then Saatchi would not now be presenting us with this, the first of a three-part show of paintings celebrating the 20th anniversary of his gallery.

You may feel a curious deja vu on entering The Triumph of Painting. County Hall suddenly looks much less like itself. Most of the bankers' baroque has now vanished behind white screens that look for all the world like the walls of an actual gallery. And the paintings, beautifully hung, seem very familiar, too, as well they might since they are by some of the most influential artists in Europe - Belgian Luc Tuymans, Briton Peter Doig, German Martin Kip penberger and Marlene Dumas, South African-born but long since based in the Netherlands. A fifth, Hermann Nitsch, is the odd man out since nobody I can think of still pays any attention to the preposterous old 'Pope of Viennese Aktionism', as he cares to be known.

So has Saatchi really spotted some new triumph to promote? Of course he hasn't. That would be like suddenly claiming to have discovered Bob Dylan. Kippenberger, with his punkish spirit, was a god to young artists everywhere long before his premature death in 1997. Tuymans had a massive show at Tate Modern last summer. Dumas makes record prices every year.

And as for the sixth painter, Jörg Immendorff, Saatchi first bought his work almost 20 years ago, when he was the squeak of German chic and hasn't shown him since. Which seems about right, given his overwrought productions.

The show opens with a terrific suite of paintings by Doig, those outlandish hybrids of landscape, photograph and mysterious invention in which something is always just about to or has just very eerily happened. Snowboarders beneath a Renoir sky, houses in strange clearings behind veils of frosted branches, a canoe drifting alone on a lake: they always suggest something less calm beneath the surface. The gallery resonates with elusive disquiet.

Kippenberger's work, too, exudes a grand atmosphere, no matter that his works are so deliberately disparate. I'm always surprised when people say he disowned personal style since his pictures have something equivalent, a very distinctive force of personality. Specifically, his famous self-portraits, those big canvases of a man naked but for outsize underpants, pulled up like Tweedledum's britches, always alone and tragicomic, as if caught between meditation and straining over the morning's ablutions.

Saatchi has a particularly seering example, a blowzy clown with a box for a cock and a balloon for a head, its string insecurely knotted in one hand as if he was desperately trying to keep himself together and tethered.

Kippenberger had his Café Paris, its walls hung with famous works including his own. Immendorff has his Café Deutschland, that sequence of hysterical, overfilled cartoonish allegories of the postwar settlement in Germany. Saatchi is showing rather a lot from the Seventies and Eighties and their sneering tantrums, as so often with crude satire, now seem strikingly dated.

Which is about the best you can say for Nitsch's 'paintings', relics of the rituals and mock crucifixions performed at his Austrian castle last century - canvases not spattered with blood, as the press keeps claiming, but just good old oil paint.

Tuymans and Dumas, as ever, show the most refined sensibilities with their bleached-out paintings, so hard won and yet appearing so lightly worked. Saatchi has a specially good collection of Dumas's work, a vast baby with a disconcertingly imperious face; a child hauling her dress over her head; rows of naked, cringeing boys, suggesting some holocaust to come. And if you look closely at the earliest Kippenbergers in the gallery, you may see an evolution or a common strain between all three artists, not just in the use of photographs, but in vulnerability threatened by corruption.

In fact, the show suggests a familiar penchant on Saatchi's part for the sinister, the bloody, the nihilistic and hysterical, for the uncanny or flatly disturbing. As painting, no matter how sophisticated, it isn't a million miles from the preoccupations of the Sensation generation.

Does Saatchi really believe the claim publicity material makes - that painting continues to be 'the most relevant and vital way that an artist can communicate' in an age of video, photography and so forth? In which case, it would seem odd to inaugurate his triumphant year of painting with works made so long ago as to be anything but present in tense. Or is he just taking advantage of the current economic revival to make good in the secondary art market?

This may be just the latest whirl of that endless merry-go-round that is Saatchi's collection, his gallery, his shows. But there is one change of direction. At the beginning, in the Eighties, he used to display tremendous American artists - Flavin, Judd, Stella, Ryman, Johns and so forth - who were the envy of British museums. Saatchi bought the works curators wanted to show and frequently ended up borrowing for exhibitions. Now he is showing what they already show, albeit in greater quantity. With this first part of The Triumph of Painting, he is following taste rather than trying to form it, and that really is a surprise.

Three to see

Degas National Gallery, until 30 Jan. Last chance to see this perfect show Richard Wentworth Tate Liverpool, until 24 April. Great and small epiphanies from Make-Do British sculptor Barbara Delaney Southampton City Art Gallery, until 30 March. Delicate and beautiful work